Indie Beer Week – We’re Celebrating Real Irish Beer

Indie Beer Week is a week long celebration of independent Irish brewing. From Waterford to Donegal, Galway to Dublin, your local breweries will be opening their doors for fun and excitement. Tours, tastings, music, food, and much, much more, awaits. This year 26 breweries will partake in events in their local communities.

Paddy’s Day UK Takeover

Paddy’s Day – the day everyone turns Irish, re-establishes our Irish skills (‘Is maith liom cáca milis!’) and even more regrettable, makes everything green – even beer! *Please don’t turn our beer green!* That’s usually how it goes around the world. For those of you who want to celebrate the ‘Irishness’ in you (without going stereotypically ‘Paddy’) our friends at Ireland Craft Beer have organised Irish craft beer tastings in various pubs and venues.

Where will Metalman Available?

Tomorrow, Gráinne will be making an appearance at the Tate Modern Terrace Bar in London. There will be some great Irish brews, gin and a special Irish menu, including Stew. *yum!* Drop in from 11am for a selection of tastings or you can book tickets here.

Check out some of the other places where you will be able to find our beers this weekend:

What beers can we try?

Depending on the location you will be able to try two of our beers; our Pale Ale or Sgt. Pepper, our sage and pepper saison. Here’s a brief description of what they are like:

Pale Ale: Our flagship Pale Ale. The one it all started with. Dark gold in colour, with a delicate white head. Citrus and floral aromas lead into hop flavours characterised by grapefruit and mandarin produced by American hops. A dry bitter finish makes this an eminently enjoyable and refreshing beer.

We thought this one might take a little explaining. It’s a lot to take in…and fit in to one can, but we did it!

Firstly, what’s a sour beer?

Sour beers have been gaining more and more popularity in the beer world in the last few years. The first time we really noticed it was when we were at Craft Brewers Conference in Portland, Oregon in 2015 – there were sour beers everywhere.

Concept : The history of sour beer is very varied – sometimes beer goes sour by mistake, but sometimes it is soured intentionally, as the souring bacteria can create interesting flavours in the beer. In the cases where it is soured intentionally, it is done by introducing souring bacteria to the beer at some point in the brewing process and allowing the beer to go sour in managed conditions. Now the thing about bacteria is that they are really really really small, and can be very hard to find if they escape their managed conditions! Therefore deliberately souring a beer is inherently risky in terms of cross-contamination in your brewery. One way to avoid (or at least minimise) the risk of this is do brew what is known as a “kettle sour”. This process used the brew-kettle as the souring vessel – the brew is started as normal and continues to the start of the boil process, but instead of adding hops, the wort is cooled to the appropriate temperature and the souring bacteria are pitched into the warm liquid. Once the souring process is complete, the wort is then boiled up again and the brew continued as normal, which kills all the souring bacteria and keeps the rest of the brewery safe. (Assuming sensible sanitation practices are followed!)

So now we have our sour beer base but what makes it Razzbeer?

Once the brewday process was complete, we transfer the brew to a fermenter as normal and pitched our normal house ale yeast to start the saccharomyces (yeast) fermentation. When the fermentation was complete, we transferred some of it to wine barrels, some of it to casks with other fruit infusions (like cucumber and mango!) and the rest of it went into a fermenter with lots of raspberries and some dried chillies – the maturation took about 10 days, by which time the beer had gained a lovely raspberry blush colour, and was tasting damn good! In the meantime, we did a can design, came up with a name and got the beer ready to leave the brewery – Razzbeer was on its way!

…and this time it’s across the bridge to attend Savour Kilkenny, Festival of Food. We’ll be there from Saturday morning, surrounded by our craft beer friends, loads of tempting food stalls and some funky tunes!

We are packing the van to the brim this year and bringing you 6 of our yummy beers on draught and 6 varieties in can – woooo! Here’s a little peek at what we’ll have with us…

Summer Pale Ale – an English style pale ale (the last of this year’s summer, in more ways than one!)

Blaager – our lager brewed with Waterford Blaas

Pale Ale – our flagship American style pale ale

Equinox – wheat lager brewed with orange, lemon and coriander

Ironmonger – amber IPA

Ginger – blonde beer brewed with fresh ginger

Heatsink – our *legendary* smoked chilli porter

Be sure to pop by on Saturday (10:30am – 6pm) and Sunday (12:30pm – 6pm) and say ‘Hi!’ and sample some of our seasonal brews!

Craft Drinks Bill

Folks, we need your help!

Alan Kelly, Labour T.D. has proposed a Bill, which we are calling the Craft Drinks Bill, which will change our current licensing laws and we need as many people as possible to support it. Here’s Alan Kelly in action yesterday at the Dáil.

So how does this affect us?

At the moment we are free to offer tours of our microbrewery. And tourists love it! However after they have heard our story and seen how we do what we do, they always ask can they bring some beer home. Unfortunately, we have to explain to them that due to our current licensing laws, we cannot sell them any beers. Alan Kelly adequately compared the craft drinks tourism to similar markets in Europe.

“For example, can you imagine a situation existing in Italy, France or Spain, where tourists visiting vineyards are prevented from purchasing wine at the end of their tour?”

Currently, the bill has moved on the second stage but we still have a long way to go.
Please help support our ever growing industry, local employment and help promote tourism in your area.

What are we asking you to do?

Well firstly, we would like you to copy and paste the letter below, fill in the areas that are specific to you and send these via email, post, or pigeon if needs be, to your local T.D.s.

Secondly, show your support online. Show us you care and get on Bookface, Twitterland etc. and use the #craftdrinksbill hastag. Share this blog with your friends.

Thirdly, take off your bras and burn them in the streets……..no, too far? Ok, ok, step 1 and 2 will suffice!

Here’s a template, (we’re making it so easy for you) you can read through it if you want to know the ins and outs, but if you could just change the X’s to name, the Y’s to county….you get the idea!

Letter Template

Good afternoon,

My name is XXX and I live at YYYYY.

I am writing to you today about the Craft Drinks Bill being proposed by
Alan Kelly, Labour T.D.

I would like you as my representatives to throw your support behind this
bill, for a number of reasons. Apart from the great boost to the local
economy through increased revenue and tourism opportunities in [YOUR
LOCAL AREA], the craft drinks industry will increase
opportunities across right across the country.

As we all sadly know, the concentration of jobs and industry in Dublin
has lead to fewer opportunities in our beautiful regional and rural
areas of Ireland. At the same time, increasing population in the capital
has led to a housing crisis and unaffordable rents as people migrate to
the city from outside Dublin.

The beauty of the craft beer drinks industry in Ireland is that it is
geographically spread right across the country; by developing industries
like brewing, distilling and cider-making outside of the capital we
will, in the long run, be increasing job opportunities all over Ireland.
The manufacturers themselves are already generating employment (craft
breweries in Ireland employ almost 450 people directly) and there are
knock-on effects to be seen in other industries, such as farming as
demand for raw material increases, and the hospitality and service
industries where these fantastic beverages are making a big splash.

It seems like the craft beverage industry has often been left behind
during initiatives to drive consumers to support Irish goods, perhaps
because the government may be afraid they would be seen to be promoting
irresponsible behaviour. The craft beverage sector is an industry that
targets consumers based on quality, taking the emphasis away from
quantity; as such, supporting our Irish drinks producers promotes a
responsible drinking message.

I hope you will throw your full weight behind this bill and support Alan
Kelly, and our craft drinks pioneers, in his proposal, and remove the
legal anomaly that is stifling the growth of this amazing industry.

Question : What do great craft beers, tremendous music and delicious food have in common?

Answer : Loads!! But in this particular instance, they will all be present in force at the Great Irish Beer Festival this weekend!

Running from today, Thursday 22nd Sept – Saturday 24th in City Hall Cork, this brand spanking new festival boasts beers from 24 breweries, brewing demos, food pairing demos, and live music consisting of the likes of the Frank and Walters and King Kong Company (among others)! If that’s not enough to whet your appetite, draught Ginger, Summer, Blaager and delicious Autumn Sour on cask are a sample of the goodies we’ll be pouring there.

You can get your tickets here to avail of the delights, and we’ll see you Leeside!

Or is that, on the session?
Either way, we’ve gotten up off our collective arses and organised some brewery tours for the next few months. (Finally!)

Tours are a tenner a head, they run on Fridays at 4pm, 5pm and 6pm and will include tastings of….errrrr….some beers. We don’t know which ones. Probably pale ale and whatever seasonals we’ve got on the go at the time. (We really haven’t thought much farther ahead than the days and times, as you can see!)

Anyway, if you ever wanted to come see us and confirm what sort of madness goes on at Metalman HQ, now’s yer chance! Starting from next week, you can book tickets here
or email tours@metalmanbrewing.com

Coincidentally, we’ve also got a fundraiser for Waterford Walls coming up this coming Friday – we’ll be pouring the first cask of our Summer seasonal, a new English style pale ale hopped with Endeavour and Pilot.

It’s shaping up to be a great night with music, DJs and, of course, great beer! Come long to Tullys Waterford on Friday evening from 7:3pm – a fiver on the door will get you entry and a free pint of Pale Ale, and the very same fiver will be donated to the festival.